


they call kids like us vicious and carved out of stone

by deerie



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Time Travel, Angst, Character Death, Character Death Fix, Fairy Tale Retellings, Happy Ending, M/M, Mild Sexual Content, Mildly Dubious Consent, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-04
Updated: 2012-12-04
Packaged: 2017-11-20 07:18:09
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 673
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/582736
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/deerie/pseuds/deerie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>Stiles never asked for this knowledge, never asked to know time and its origin, to see the threads binding everything that was and is together. </i> </p><p>In which time is its own curse and everything comes with a price.</p>
            </blockquote>





	they call kids like us vicious and carved out of stone

**Author's Note:**

> Warnings: character death(s). There is one scene that could be construed as dubious consent, but I'm really not sure about it. Still, it's better to warn too much than too little.

This is the way the end begins: with loss. An insidious sense of loss curls its way around his ribcage, squeezes his heart, plants the first seeds in his head. He might have been too young once upon a time to recognize the specter living in his chest, but he knows it well now.

The basic fact of his universe is that everyone dies. All good things have an end.

He changes things sometimes, starts over, but all roads lead back to these simple truths: his mother still dies and he will always lose Derek Hale.

 _Fuck_ , Stiles thinks as he drags himself up off the pile of rubble. Derek is a smear of blood and bone and fur against the gritty floor and this doesn’t get easier, no matter how many times it happens.

Stiles stands up, snarls into the darkness with dull human teeth - because that’s all he’ll ever be, human and weak and utterly _useless_ \- and shakes his arms out, gathers the pale golden strands of time in his hands and tugs himself back to the beginning again.

He knows hundreds of things not to do. He wonders what he has to do to make this right.

*

In one time stream, his mother doesn’t die in the hospital. She doesn’t die wrapped in IVs and stark white sheets, the staccato beeping of a heart monitor keeping bleak time.

They catch the cancer in time - _pancreatic carcinoma_ , small enough to scoop from her body and put years back on her life. After the surgery, she cries and clutches her husband, her baby boy.

Stiles hugs her tight, but his eyes are sharp - his body may be young, but his mind is not. He has seen her die before. Nothing is this easy.

Two weeks later, his paranoia is rewarded when a tractor trailer swipes their car off the side of the road and into a ditch.

Stiles grips the strands of time tight in his hands as best he can, squeezed tight by twisted metal and broken glass, and goes back to the beginning.

*

Stiles can’t keep his mother from dying. It takes him too many tries to realize this. There are too many car crashes, too many cancers, too many accidental chokings, too many muggings and he can’t keep doing this to her even if she never remembers any of it.

Eventually, he has to let his mother die.

*

With time, everything dies, everyone rots.

Everyone withers away, except for Stiles.

*

He goes to sleep for many years and when he wakes up, there is someone beside him.

 _Derek_ , his mind supplies him. Memories start to pour in of an entire life he remembers but hasn’t lived, not really.

He lets Derek push him back into the bed gently, lets him trail wet kisses down his body. He arches up into the heat of someone else around him and rocks with the motion of someone else pressing into him.

He thinks they’ve done this before, many times, but he doesn’t remember the slick slip of sweaty skin against his and he doesn’t remember how he felt in this same place before.

It feels like he’s taking something that isn’t his to hold.

Derek comes, voice rough when he moans out, “Stiles,” and that jolts Stiles out of his haze, makes him panic, threads meeting him halfway, eager as he is to start over.

*

Stiles never asked for this knowledge, never asked to know time and its origin, to see the threads binding everything that was and is together.

His mother dies the first time and wispy strands rise out of the darkness and curl around him to sooth.

This, too, comes with a price.

*

This is how he lets go: in the woods.

Scott searches in the underbrush for his lost inhaler. Derek stalks out from between the trees and Stiles doesn’t know him, not really, except for the way he does. Stiles has never known someone so completely before.

Stiles decides to let the story play out this time.

**Author's Note:**

> I've got a list of prompts for December hiding in a notepad file and this fills two of them: a character who has lost something and fairy tale. The story I chose to slightly retell was Rip Van Winkle, but the story has more to do with time than anything. Another concept I molded to fit my use is the idea of eternal return - the idea that the power of something lies in its origin.


End file.
